Lessons in Assigning the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki
May 8, 2008 by Tiffany Derville
The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki is a collaborative project for evaluating the blogs of Fortune 500 companies. You can read John Cass’ discussion of the project and its history on PR Open Mic here. John highlighted our first round of student blog reviews on his blog here. (Thanks, John!)
John, my class, and I have been discussing what to do about blog revisions. Due to the contribution of students’ blog reviews to this exciting project, I wanted to provide students with content and writing mechanics feedback. The challenge was that I asked students to post their blog reviews before I shared my feedback.
I discussed this issue with my class this afternoon. Students requested that I provide feedback for subsequent rounds of students’ blog reviews before they would be posted. John has also encouraged students to provide constructive feedback and pose questions on one another’s blog reviews. Helping others through the commenting area is a key part of blogging. John shared one of his blog posts about constructive criticism. Here is one of my favorite lines from it:
“The message is that if you would not say such negative things out loud why are you writing them on the web?”
The “would I say this to the person’s face” exercise is a useful test of whether the words are appropriate. John also notes that constructive criticism should be presented in a friendly rather than confrontational way. Giving a compliment before constructive criticism can help set the tone.
After reading John’s discussions, I feel comfortable with sharing content feedback on students’ blogs; however, for now, I prefer to save my editing of writing mechanics for offline conversations.
What do you think about sharing constructive criticism in a public forum? I invite readers to share their thoughts and stories.
Tiffany,
I wil tackle the Accenture blogs for the blog review next Tuesday. I like your suggestion.
Now I feel like I should have attended class on Thursday instead of studying from home.
I think online constructive criticism works fine for content related aspects. I enjoyed John’s criticism of our fellow student blogs, and I hope I receive a similar treatment after I write about Accenture. But, as you address, editing of writing mechanics would sound weird on a comment. Really weird.
My thoughts.
Ben
thanks for including me in the discussion and encouraging your students to conduct reviews of the Fortune 500. Several reviewers have also conducted interviews with bloggers at Fortune 500 companies, I wonder if any of the students would consider doing that? The advantage is that you are able to ask questions about the background to a blog, that would not be obvious from looking outside. For instance you can ask how blogs are monitored by a company.
Ben, thank you for your comment. I look forward to reading your blog review of Accenture. I apologize for not e-mailing you about our additional class agenda item for Thursday. (For outside readers, I gave the same class lesson on Tuesday and Thursday due to a local public relations conference that most of my students attended.)
John, thank you for your comment and suggestion to interview bloggers. At most universities, we are required to go through an ethics board (known as the IRB) for anything that involves surveying or interviewing.
At the University of Oregon, we have a 12-page application to complete, in addition to appendices with our recruitment script and interview questions. The process takes time. By the time I complete the application, our spring classes will have ended.
I could compete an application for the fall, but I wonder if there would still be blogs left to review by then.